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the other set
two days before Christmas – have nothing to do with each other.
“Beginning of this Day,” a brief start to a story, plunges immediately
into dramatic conflict: a girl, orphaned during the war, behaves
awkwardly in front of her adoptive mother’s friends (HRC 1.5).
The five-page fragment called “Now the Day is Over” bears some
resemblances to “Christmas Games”: a young woman flees a weird
consistory in a country house (HRC 8.7). The trope of the young
woman out of her depth or out of familiar surroundings appears in
other fragments. In “Only Young Once,” a young woman’s engage
ment does not sit well with her family, especially her mother, and
she walks the countryside with her fiancé to avoid the scrutiny of her
siblings and parents (HRC 8.7). In “Still the Moon,” a young woman
named Nona is hired to write the “autobiography” of Mrs. Du Picq
based on her diaries and other personal papers; Nona travels to an
isolated house to perform this task (HRC 8.16). Another fragment,
mistakenly catalogued as a fragment of an untitled story (HRC 1.1),
is, in fact, Bowen’s translation of part of a letter by Gustave Flaubert.
Other copies of the letter can be found among her translations
(HRC 9.8). Each of these stories begins with intensity, but that
intensity is brought up short by the unfinished state of these works.
Of all the fragments that have been omitted from this volume,
“Beginning of this Day” is notable for the quality of its writing, yet,
living up to its title, it remains a mere beginning.
    By contrast, I have included longer stories that are nearly com
plete, but not quite: “The Bazaar,” “The Man and the Boy,” “Story
Scene,” and “Ghost Story.” Other stories in this volume remain
unfinished, although in certain cases – notably, “Flowers Will Do,”
“Christmas Games,” and “Women in Love” – the end is clearly in
sight. The value of these unfinished stories lies in their manifest
“pressure,” to recall Bowen’s term. Characters and events coalesce
with inevitability. At the end of “Flowers Will Do,” the wordless
meeting between Mrs. Simonez and Sydney leaves the impression
that everyone has lost something, but the story is tantalisingly
inconclusive. Not liking each other, Mrs. Simonez and Sydney will
meet again, awkwardly, because their troubled relations are filtered
entirely through Doris. Bowen does say that a story “must have
implications which will continue when the story is done” (
Collected
Impressions 153). The scale of the short story in general makes any
conclusion seem sudden. Rather than ending, a story rounds off,
then continues to reverberate after it stops. In this sense, a short
story always implies more than it says and suggests more than it
shows.
    In this volume, finished and unfinished stories alike display
Bowen’s fierce control over materials. Authorial control does not
preclude the disarray into which a story can throw a reader’s expec
tations. In “Rx for a Short Story,” Bowen describes the detonating
force of the story:
    We have within us a capacity, a desire, to respond. One of the
insufficiencies of routine existence is the triviality of the demands
it makes on us. Largely unused remain our funds of pity, spon
taneous love, unenvious admiration or selfless anger. Into these, a
story may drop a depth-charge. (1)
    Pity, love, admiration, and anger find expression once they have
been sounded by the depth-charge of fiction. Stories continue to
resonate after they end because they locate funds of unexpended
feeling within the reader. The metaphor of a ship dropping charges
to locate an enemy submarine heralds an encounter between the
story as a work of art and the unknown, even antagonistic, reader.
The stories in this volume drop a series of charges at different
depths to flush the reader’s hidden funds of feeling from their hiding
place. Whether the depth-charges find their target depends entirely
on the